*Emergency managers say the [wrecker] has presided over a dangerous erosion in US capacity to prepare for and respond to natural disasters.*
US citizens: call on Minnesota to arrest Renee Good's killer without waiting — there are enough grounds already.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and say, as suggested by Robert Reich:
Don't vote for the DHS spending bill unless it (1) disarms the deportation thugs (agents of "ICE") (2) prevents them from targeting people based on their race, language, or accent, and (3) stipulates that agents who harm civilians are liable under criminal and civil laws.
Even better in my view: abolish the deportation thug agency entirely with no replacement.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on CBS to dismiss Bari Weiss as head of the news department.
US citizens: call on GoFundMe to follow its own rules against raising money for people who committed violent acts.
I refuse to use GoFundMe for any purpose because it requires running nonfree JavaScript code. Nearly all web sites require nonfree JS to make a payment, the exception I know of being fsf.org.
US citizens: call on Congress to investigate the deportation thugs' use of deadly force.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on your state's governor to protect kids from RFK jr's vaccine rollback.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: call on Congress to restore PBS and NPR funding.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on US mass media to Stop calling it a ceasefire. Report on what is really happening in Gaza and the West Bank.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
Nicaragua's tyrant couple have started a wave of repression as a response to the bully's seizure of Maduro and his wife.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
If you don't know what I'm talking about I have so many Previouslies for you. Almost exactly a decade's worth!
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
- Boot Pi with HDMI monitor attached: works fine.
- Boot without monitor: all GPIO inputs "flap" about once a second.
- Plug in monitor: 10 seconds later, inputs start behaving normally.
- Unplug monitor: remains good. Until reboot.
WTF?
Raspberry Pi 4 Model B Rev 1.5, Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm) 12.11. Two different Pis, same behavior.
I guess I don't care why it wants a monitor so badly, so I tried to fake it out and convince it that one is there. Are are all of my config.txt changes:
#dtoverlay=vc4-kms-v3d dtoverlay=vc4-kms-v3d,noaudio max_framebuffers=2 [all] dtoverlay=disable-wifi dtoverlay=disable-bt framebuffer_width=1280 framebuffer_height=720 hdmi_force_hotplug=1 hdmi_drive=2 core_freq_min=500 core_freq=500
I tried adding this to commandline.txt, didn't help: video=HDMI-A-1:1920x1080M@60
Two months before it changed its name to "Meta," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally introduced us to his metaverse for work: Horizon Workrooms, envisioned as a virtual space for workers to collaborate. Today, the company announced it's shutting that space down: "Meta has made the decision to discontinue Workrooms as a standalone app, effective February 16, 2026," reads the note tucked away on a help page. [...]
Meta just laid off roughly 10 percent of its entire Reality Labs division, over 1,000 jobs. In the aftermath, it's becoming increasingly clear that Zuckerberg has changed his mind about what the word "metaverse" actually means. [...]
Bloomberg writes that "Meta will continue to develop the metaverse, but with a focus on mobile phones instead of the fully immersive VR headsets that the company initially imagined." To be clear, the term "metaverse" was coined by Snow Crash author Neal Stephenson to describe a fully immersive shared VR world, but I suppose mobile makes sense if you consider Fortnite to be a metaverse and don't need the "fully immersive" part.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Let's say you run a nonprofit animal shelter. And for some reason, some people feel you should be seeing hockey-stick growth, but the donations aren't covering it.
So you decide to start up a side-line of selling kittens for meat.
Then you will inevitably have someone stroking their chin and saying, "Yes, yes, but how could they afford to stay open if they weren't selling kitten deli slices?"
Some might say -- maybe you aren't an animal shelter any more. Some might say.
I wrote that a couple of years ago but it remains relevant and widely applicable, so I want to do what I can to get the Kitten Meat Deli into the general discourse. My hope is that some day we can say, "Ah yes, they are using the Kitten Meat defense, that's a poplar defense" and people will know what you're talking about.
It was originally about Mozilla becoming an advertising company but it could as easily have been about Mozilla becoming an AI company or about Mozilla going all in on cryptocurrency or about Internet Archive doing the same or about Mozilla being funded by Google or about The Long Now Foundation releasing NFTs or about Mozilla allowing W3C to bless DRM or, more recently about Wikipedia taking funding from Microsoft, OpenAI, Facebook and Amazon (and without even the fig-leaf of "donation" but as customers).
Yes, the Sliced Kittens Defense. A strong defense!
XScreenSaver 6.14 is out now, including iOS and Android. A whopping eighteen new savers this time! As I mentioned last month, I wrote a new XScreenSaver module that is API-compatible with Shadertoy, which means that I am now able to pull demos written that way into the XScreenSaver fold. These 18 savers are the first of that batch. A limitation here is that I can only redistribute Shadertoy-derived savers that have licenses that are compatible with the rest of XScreenSaver.
The default license on shadertoy.com is "CC-BY-NC-SA", and so the vast majority of uploads use that. However, that license, by prohibiting commercial use, is not an open source license, and is more restrictive than the license used by the rest of XScreenSaver. For a Shadertoy saver to be distributed with or within XScreenSaver, it must be licensed under a compatible license, such as: MIT, BSD, CC-BY, CC-BY-SA or CC0.
So this first batch of 18 new savers are the ones that I was able to find that were both interesting and compatibly-licensed.
If you know of other cool Shadertoys that use one of the above licenses, please send them my way, and maybe I'll include them in a future release.
Likewise, if there are some others that are really good but that are not compatibly licensed, let me know about those as well and maybe I'll ask the author if they'd be willing to relicense them for inclusion. It's worth a shot.
(XScreenSaver does not, cannot and will not load the savers from shadertoy.com directly, because reasons, so let that idea go.)
One odd thing that you may notice about these is that they are oddly static as far as screensavers go, which is to say that despite their complexity, they draw the exact same scene every time. Most things written for Shadertoy generate each frame based on time-since-launch, without any mechanism for external sliders, or a random number seed. That's just how they're written.
Anyway, about the new XShaderToy framework that powers these new savers:
You may find that performance sucks on your machine. That means your GPU is not good, oh no. In particular, the Raspberry Pi 4b sucks at running most of these. Crank down the "Resolution" slider for a better frame rate.
To make these work in the wider XScreenSaver ecosystem, I had to target four different versions of GLSL that are all stupidly and arbitrarily incompatible with each other, both in the set of available library functions, and in basic syntax of the language such as the type promotion rules and whether integers exist.
- Linux: An OpenGL "compatibility profile" context anywhere from 3.1 to 4.6. Pi is 3.1, some other Linux devices are other versions.
- macOS Cocoa: An OpenGL 4.1 "core profile" context, which means no backward compatibility affordances for earlier versions.
- macOS X11: OpenGL 2.1, yes, 2.1.
- iOS: OpenGL ES 3.0. Note that "OpenGL ES 3.0" is not "OpenGL 3.0", it is "WebGL 2.0". This is all completely sane and normal.
- Android: An OpenGL ES context anywhere from 3.0 to 3.2.
So I had to write a bunch of compatibility shims to, for example, make code written to the "OpenGL ES 3.0" API able to run on an "OpenGL 2.1" system. And it's a complete shitshow. Maybe it will work, most of the time. Huge thanks to Carsten Steger for helping me understand this nonsense.
And of course thanks to the original authors of these "new" savers for putting there work out there, and under compatible licenses: mrange, otaviogood, nemerix, kali, jaszunio15 and 3w36zj6.
Who could have predicted this outcome except everybody:
Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department says it is not enforcing the new law while the constitutionality of California's state mask-visibility bills, SB 627 and SB 805, is challenged in court. [...]
Lacking any clear path to action, LA County's mask ordinance is simply political theater, said Sam Brown-Vazquez, a coordinator with Avocado Heights Vaqueros who leads environmental justice and rapid response work in the unincorporated LA County neighborhood.
"It's a performative farce," he said, "a pat on the back for the Supervisors to look like they're doing something."
The lawsuit alleges that the No Secret Police Act and the No Vigilantes Act threaten the safety of officers facing harassment, doxing and violence while carrying out enforcement duties.
The DOJ also contends the laws violate the Constitution's Supremacy Clause, under which states have no power to control the operations of the federal government.
Planet Debian upstream is hosted by Branchable.